In addition, they racked up championship after championship, with Celtic’s win in 1926 and Motherwell’s acclaimed triumph of 1932 the only interruptions to Rangers’ title successes between 1923 and 1935. At times the club’s dominance seemed all-encompassing; the league and cup Double was achieved on no fewer than four occasions between these years and by the end of the 1930 season, Rangers had won every competition they entered, capturing the league as well as all three domestic cups, although the Charity Cup had to be awarded on the toss of a coin, after a 2-2 draw with Celtic in the final at Hampden. In 1934, the club repeated the feat, winning all four of the major titles they contested, and this time no coins were required.
Sweeping all before them domestically, Rangers began to see themselves as the foremost and best club not just in Scotland, but in the whole of Britain, and in the early 1930s Struth began to associate the club with Arsenal, the grandest and most successful team in England, as the Gunners captured the First Division championship three years running under legendary manager Herbert Chapman between 1933 and 1935. Struth instigated an annual ‘Battle of Britain’ style challenge match between the sides, and Rangers showed their overall strength by winning home and away against the English champions in September 1933, although despite their popularity with both sets of fans, these games held little or no interest to the wider public.
To capture the imagination of the country, it would take a more formally organised cross-border tournament, and in 1938 the Empire Exhibition was held in Glasgow, which included a cup competition to be held at Ibrox, involving the best sides of the day from Scotland and England.
The exhibition was opened by King George VI, whose stuttering address to the Ibrox dignitaries apparently so struck actor Colin Firth that the leading man was moved to tears when he viewed the Pathé News footage as part of his research for his role in The King’s Speech. It was set up perfectly for the Ibrox club, but Rangers failed to make an impression on the tournament, losing to Everton in the first round, and to make matters worse, the competition was won by Celtic, who beat the Merseysiders 1-0 in the final.
The Parkhead club fought back strongly in the late ’30s, winning the title in 1936 and again in 1938 with a gifted team led by the legendary forward Jimmy McGrory, to this day the record goalscorer in the history of British football. Rangers, however, recaptured the championship in 1939 and they had started the following season strongly, in first place with nine points from five games, when war broke out with Germany and league football was formally suspended across Britain. Struth, however, was not about to allow the conflict to break up the team which he had spent nearly 20 years presiding over, and during World War Two, through his network of contacts, the manager kept the majority of his players back from front-line service by securing them jobs on the Clyde, mostly in the workshops, shipyards and munitions factories in what were known at the time as ‘reserved occupations’.
Football continued during the conflict, although not in an official capacity, but if anything Rangers, with the majority of their best players held beyond the draft, were even more dominant during the period of wartime football, winning 25 of the 34 regionalised cups and mini-leagues which they entered. With the cancellation of all contracts, players were allowed to make guest appearances, and the great English winger Stanley Matthews turned out a couple of times for Rangers alongside the local boys, such as youngster Willie Waddell, a future Rangers manager, who spent much of the war working as an electrician with Harland and Wolff. It was football, but not quite as we knew it, as some bizarre scorelines were registered, including Rangers’ 8-1 defeat by Hibs in September 1941, and a victory over Celtic by the same margin in front of 30,000 at Ibrox on New Year’s Day, 1943.
Old Firm tribulations continued during the war years, on and off the field; the 1943 game had seen two Celtic players sent off, while two years earlier, the authorities had threatened to discontinue the fixture for the war’s duration after Celtic fans rioted during a game at Ibrox. Celtic, it seems, were not entirely committed to their part as wartime cheerleaders and made only a lacklustre effort to stay competitive during the conflict, while Struth by contrast saw it as Rangers’ role to keep up morale at home while others were overseas, fighting for king and country. This was his pretext for keeping back so many players from active service, a stance which was wholly justified in his eyes. ‘We on the home front, charged with a duty to maintain the morale of the workers in the factories, shipyards and other branches of industry, can claim to have played our part in the victorious end of the German war,’ he had the brass neck to maintain after the defeat of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
After the end of the war, the resumption of league football in Scotland and England for the 1946/47 season was taken as a sign that things were getting back to normal in austerity-ravaged Britain. Huge crowds flocked back to football grounds the length and breadth of the country, revealing that, if anything, the game had acquired an even greater role in the weekly routine of working people in the immediate post-war period. ‘Normal’ by this time in Glasgow of course meant that football was polarised along a marked religious division, and for those hoping that the spirit of solidarity and the post-war consensus would lead to a realignment of attitudes in Scotland, there would, sadly, only be disappointment, as the country continued to seethe with bigotry, which had become entrenched in the culture of the west of the country by this time.
The Kirk had pulled back from some of its more controversial language of the 1920s, after the Nuremberg trials laid bare the Nazi ideology in all its hideousness, but by then the damage had been done. Rangers, still revelling in their role as the sporting wing of the Protestant establishment, led the way with their policy of exclusivity, but they were by no means the only institution at the time to be implementing, overtly or otherwise, such discriminatory employment practices. The media and the banks as well as certain law firms and industries all largely continued to be Catholic-free zones after the war, while Sir George Graham, secretary of the SFA since 1928, felt complacent enough not to bother hiding some of his extra-curricular activities from the general public, openly listing a parallel career as ‘Past Grandmaster, Grand Lodge of Scotland’ on his ‘Who’s Who’ page in 1956.
A prominent Freemason and an Orangeman, Graham had clearly been climbing the greasy pole to the top of more than just the governing body. Scotland has a long and dispiriting association with Freemasonry, and Graham hadn’t even bothered to disguise his links to the organisation, despite the Masons supposedly being a secret society. In his role as SFA secretary, Sir George was responsible for all appointments and advancements within the governing body; ‘No Irish need apply’ was a common attachment to advertised vacancies at the time, and needless to say, members of that community did not feature prominently in the SFA’s role of employees during this period.
Also in the 1950s, the ‘Orange vote’ ensured that the Conservative Party held the kind of electoral majority in Scotland which in subsequent years it struggled to maintain in the English shires and Home Counties. The Conservatives won over 50 per cent of the popular vote north of the border at the 1955 general election, a feat which their Labour opponents have never been able to match, even in the landslide victories of 1945 and, more recently, 1997 when Tory MPs were wiped off the political map in Scotland. Indeed, the modern decline in acceptability of voting along religious lines is one of the main reasons Tory grandee Sir Malcolm Rifkind has cited to explain his party’s lack of popular support in contemporary Scotland.
The old clichés and excuses about football being a microcosm of society didn’t apply here however; Rangers by now were part of an establishment network that was Protestant, Unionist and virulently anti-Catholic, and indeed as a sporting institution, they were in many ways the avant-garde of the whole movement, the means by which ordinary, working-class Protestants were given a stake in and allowed to revel in the institutionalised bigotry of the period. There is, unfortunately, no getting away from the fact that, ov
er the course of the ensuing decades, Rangers supporters embraced and relished their role in this process to a truly appalling extent.
Of course, in order to reinforce this elevated sense of their own status within society, Rangers had to win. The club began the post-war period by helping themselves to the league title in 1947 and then the Scottish Cup the following year, before in 1949, following the introduction of the League Cup after the resumption to compensate for the reduced number of league fixtures per season to just 30 from the pre-war 38, Rangers achieved a noted success when they collected all three of the available domestic trophies to win a first Treble, or the ‘Triple Crown’ as the press dubbed it at the time.
Rangers were captained at this time by Jock ‘Tiger’ Shaw, whom the manager had rescued from the Lanarkshire coal mines and part-time footballing obscurity when he signed him from Airdrie for £2,000 in 1936. A no-nonsense full-back who rarely ventured forward, Shaw epitomised Rangers’ uncompromising style of play with his tough tackling and his rugged defensive discipline. Still led by the indomitable Struth, now into his 70s, Rangers were evolving into an even more stridently defensive side, with hardman Shaw having replaced the altogether more cultured Meiklejohn as the on-field leader.
Just as the deposed Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, was touring the world, making speeches and warning that in Europe, ‘an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent’, in reference to the emerging Communist bloc, so a similar ‘Iron Curtain’ had latterly been drawn across Scottish football, in the form of the Rangers defence, as the wartime leader’s mantra was immediately adopted by the press to describe Rangers’ back-five formation of Young, Shaw, McColl, Woodburn and Cox. This defensive solidity was supplemented by long diagonal passes or balls up the line to the wingers, with particular reliance placed on the skill and speed of outside-right Willie ‘Deedle’ Waddell and the iron forehead of centre-forward Willie Thornton.
The success of the Iron Curtain defence was not down to astute tactical organisation or any kind of strategic solidity in the ranks. Rangers attacked as much as they could, they were just an unexceptional offensive unit and by way of compensation, they had five hatchet men at the back – imposing, tough-tackling figures in an era which was more indulgent of the physical side of the game, men who would argue it out among themselves in the dressing room afterwards if they so much as conceded a goal.
The club’s hegemony within the domestic game was challenged during this period from an unlikely source; Hibernian produced an extraordinarily gifted team, containing, in noted contrast to the Iron Curtain defence operating at Ibrox, the ‘Famous Five’ forward line of Turnbull, Reilly, Ormond, Smith and Johnstone. The Easter Road men captured the league title on three occasions, in 1948, 1951 and 1952, yet Rangers, only an average team by comparison, lacking the flair of their capital rivals but still as remorselessly solid and consistent as ever, collected the championship four times over the same period, in 1947, 1949 when they overtook Dundee on the final day of the season after the Taysiders succumbed 4-1 against Falkirk, 1950 and, in 1953, holding off Hibernian only on goal average after another tense finale. Using the modern system of goal difference, Hibs were ahead and would have won by one goal, but the older, more complicated classification method was still in place and, with Waddell scoring a crucial equaliser against Queen of the South to earn a 1-1 draw in their final fixture, the players and staff in the Rangers dressing room had to wait until the permutations were properly calculated before they could be confirmed and acknowledged as champions.
Domestically at least, Rangers were still the team to beat, but once again, just as in the Empire Exhibition Cup of 1938, the club passed up a rare opportunity to make an impact before a wider audience, as in 1953 another cross-border knockout tournament was organised, this time to celebrate the accession to the throne of George VI’s daughter, the young Queen Elizabeth. The top four teams from north and south of the border were invited to take part in the Coronation Cup, with Rangers falling at the first hurdle in a defeat to Manchester United. Mortifyingly, Celtic, who were such a mediocre and ineffective team domestically at the time that their original inclusion in the competition was called into question in some quarters, beat Arsenal then Manchester United and lastly Hibernian, conquerors of Spurs and Newcastle and arguably the greatest side in Britain at the time, with a 2-0 scoreline in the Hampden final.
Without wishing to read too much into a limited set of results, the impression is nevertheless unavoidable that while Rangers were happy to rule the roost in Scotland, outside of their domestic comfort zone they struggled to cope with the challenge of opponents who were perhaps less impressed by the self-styled notion of their own supremacy. Celtic by contrast, along with many other clubs whose momentary aristeia flared up all too briefly during these decades, seem to have been stifled by the environment of Scottish football at this time and yearned for the opportunity to show what they were capable of on a broader stage. It was a mentality which would reach its apex in the European Cup win in 1967, the Parkhead club’s first attempt on the competition after repeated failures by Rangers.
The Coronation Cup win inspired Celtic to a league and cup Double the following year, but in the 20 years following the war, until Jock Stein arrived at the club in the mid-’60s and led them to European success, 1954 was their only year of championship glory. In truth, for whatever reason, Celtic did themselves no favours during this period of nepotistic navel-gazing under the complacent and stubborn chairmanships of Tom White and Sir Robert Kelly, as the club were for the most part reduced to the role of happy-go-lucky but feckless also-rans.
By now, Bill Struth was ailing badly and questions were starting to be asked, covertly and discreetly at first, about his position as Rangers’ manager. As early as April 1947, club chairman Jimmy Bowie had hinted that the veteran boss, then aged 71, might consider a move upstairs to become a director. Struth baulked at the suggestion, however, and within a short space of time it was the chairman’s own seat which had been vacated, rather than the manager’s. Struth went to war on Bowie, mustering the club’s major shareholders against the chairman, who had made the mistake of upsetting Struth just two months before he was due for re-election.
Once the manager moved against him, it became clear that Bowie’s position as chairman was deceptively weak, and at the club’s AGM in the summer of 1947, he was eventually forced out and replaced on an enlarged Rangers board by, among others, Struth himself. Instead of becoming an unwaged director, as Bowie had initially hoped, Struth had maintained his position as manager and joined the board on his own terms, after successfully suing, in partnership with club secretary William Rogers Simpson, to have the club’s constitution amended to allow paid employees at Ibrox to become directors. A Rangers man his entire life, first supporter, then player, followed by director and finally chairman, Jimmy Bowie never set foot in Ibrox again.
By contrast Struth, now a widower following the suicide of his wife Kate in 1941, was starting to spend almost his entire waking life within the confines of Ibrox Park. The stadium wasn’t just his spiritual home, it was his real and actual abode as the manager effectively set up residence within the ground, only returning to his flat around the corner on Copland Road to sleep. Struth’s position appeared to be strengthened considerably going into the 1950s, having ousted Bowie and become a director himself, although by this time he was afflicted with significant health problems. Increasingly frail in appearance and condition, Struth was suffering from pain on his lower left side and he eventually developed a gangrene infection in his left foot, which, in the autumn of 1950, had to be amputated. But still he soldiered on, putting on a brave face and stoically hiding his ailments as best he could behind his otherwise still immaculate deportment, which, following his leg operation, was augmented by the addition of a modish cane. At least now he had a handy instrument with which to beat his errant players!
His power seemed to be waning, however, and Rangers failed to win a trophy in
1951, losing the league to Hibs and exiting the Scottish Cup at the hands of the same opponents. The following year, the club repeated the feat, the first time that Rangers had endured two consecutive trophyless seasons since Struth took charge at Ibrox. The team rallied in 1953, capturing the title from their Edinburgh rivals by a whisker on the last day of the season, and winning the Scottish Cup as well, but they missed out on the prized Coronation Cup and when Celtic took their first title since the war the following season, the game was finally up for the Grand Old Man of Ibrox. Chairman John Wilson had been reluctant to move to replace Struth, understandably given what had happened to Jimmy Bowie, and during 1953/54 the manager’s health continued to deteriorate. He had to be carried up and down the marble staircase to his office and was continuously in and out of hospital. Barely able to stay on his feet, Struth suffered repeated falls, most seriously when climbing the stairs to the directors’ box at Ibrox, and then again at Celtic Park during the Ne’erday game, after which he found himself back in hospital again. He was absent from Ibrox as often as not, and captain George Young was repeatedly left in charge of team affairs due to the manager’s constant non-attendance. It was a disaster and Celtic romped to the Double.
Struth finally bowed to the inevitable and was cajoled into stepping down in the summer of 1954 at the age of 78, after 34 years in the job; the builder John Lawrence had joined the Rangers board in March, and he was able to accelerate the process of the manager’s eventual retirement. Two years later Struth was dead. At Celtic Park the flags, including the detested Irish Tricolour, flew at half-mast and half a minute’s silence was impeccably observed within the ground. Struth had died on the eve of an Old Firm game, which was won, fittingly, 2-0 by Rangers.
To modern sensibilities he would be considered, perhaps quite rightly, a dastardly old blimp, a pompous old windbag, far too concerned with the projection of his own inflated self-image. He was distinctly old school, implementing and propagating 19th-century values well beyond their expiry date, and on the issue of religious prejudice, the legacy of bigotry which infested the game in Scotland during the period of his stewardship at Ibrox remained an issue for all those who watch and enjoy Scottish football right down to the present day. Perhaps Herald columnist Hugh MacDonald summed it up best when he described Struth as ‘naïve and full of what a skittish bull can leave behind’.
Tangled Up in Blue Page 8
